I opened the folder and began to read.
As I expected, the police hadn't bothered much with Kaplon's case. An investigation did not seem warranted, and police officers weren't in the habit of doing unnecessary work. They didn't even bother with pictures. Instead, the report included a rough sketch of the body's position. I shook my head, disgusted. I made a copy of the sketch in my notebook.
Yosef Kaplon was found in his apartment with his wrists slit. The wounds were vertical. Most people got that wrong and slashed horizontally. When you sliced vertically, you bled faster and your chances of dying were much higher. There were no other wounds.
A straight razor was found next to his body. I gritted my teeth when I realized the exact position of the razor in relation to the body had not been recorded. This was shoddy work, even for an obvious suicide. Kaplon was dressed in pants and shoes and undershirt. There were no signs of forced entry, a struggle, or a search after valuables. The landlady, a Mrs. Greenberg, found the body on the afternoon of Friday, August 25, when she came to collect the week's rent. Based on her previous visits to the apartment, she said that nothing seemed to be missing.
The report noted that money was found in the pants pocket of the deceased. A wristwatch lay on a nightstand in his bedroom. Additional currency was found next to the watch. The sums, both pocket and nightstand, were paltry. I copied the sums into my notebook, frowning. Together they totaled far less than what people had been shoving into Kaplon's hand after his performance in Café Budapest. Still, this was no robbery. Robbers didn't bother staging a suicide. They hit quickly and ran. In addition, a robber would have left nothing of value behind. Not the money, not the watch. So where did the money go?
Time of death could not be determined with any degree of accuracy—Kaplon had been dead for too long by the time he was found. However, the medical examiner estimated that Kaplon had killed himself on Wednesday night or the following morning. Upon reading this, I paused. I had encountered Kaplon on the street Wednesday morning and had gone to see him perform that night. He might have killed himself shortly after going home from Café Budapest, shortly after our conversation.
I ran our talk over in my mind, scouring for signs that might have indicated that Kaplon had been depressed or emotionally shaky. Our discussion had been bleak and mournful, but that was to be expected. No discussion of what happened to us and our families in Auschwitz could have been otherwise. Kaplon's story was unique only in the sense that all of our stories were. No survivor had the same story as another. Nor was Kaplon unique in that he was left alone in the world after the war. Many were the same way. Including me. Could something in our conversation that night have pushed him over the edge? Kaplon had been solemn, I thought, but if telling me his story had darkened his mood sufficiently to induce suicide, he'd showed no sign of it.
I picked up the note that Kaplon had left behind. His handwriting had a number of particularities. Two of the letters—aleph and lamed—had distinct shapes. I could probably identify anything else he'd written based on those two letters alone. I read the note five times and memorized it. It was in Hebrew and short, just four lines:
I am sorry. Sorry for being alive while you are dead, Mother. Sorry for surviving when you did not. I cannot go on any longer.
4
I exited Reuben's office before he returned, leaving the file on his desk. I had everything I could glean from it summarized in my notebook. It was very little.
I could go back to Milosh now, I knew. Kaplon's note was scant explanation in and of itself, but coupled with the story he had told me about his survival in the camp and his deep grief over his mother, it provided a clear motive for his suicide. Milosh would accept it as a complete answer. The police had done so without even knowing Kaplon's story. I could do the same.
My mouth turned sour as I considered this. I realized that I was feeling a reluctance to let go of this case so soon after I'd begun it. Something was bothering me. It was that sense of wrongness again. Kaplon and I had been in the same camp, faced similar hardships, lived in terror of the same cruelties, lost our family to the same evil. And now he was dead, had taken his own life. Why? Why bother surviving all that only to kill yourself now that we had a country of our own, a place where we could be proud Jews?
A heavy dizziness came over me and I closed my eyes for a moment, disoriented. I felt exhausted and empty inside, like I'd been hollowed out. And I was famished. I checked my watch. The hands were blurry, and I had to squint to make out the time. It was twenty-five minutes past three in the afternoon. I hadn't eaten since breakfast, but that did not account for the hunger that now gnawed at the inside of my stomach.
There are different kinds of hunger. There is the hunger one normally feels when too much time elapses between meals, and there is another hunger, one most people never encounter. It is a beastly sort of hunger, a shadowy thing lurking forever at the edges of civilization, waiting for any opportunity to advance and sink its teeth into vulnerable men and women. The first hunger is an annoyance; the second is a ravenous terror of a thing, an affliction. It is enough to drive one mad. It is the sort of hunger that kills.
In the camp, I was introduced to the second sort of hunger. The scarcity of food, living on the verge of starvation for months, had driven many prisoners into themselves, leading them to withdraw from the world as they withered away to walking skeletons before they died. Others, those who managed to survive, had done so with the hunger eating away at them from the inside like a cancer. A tumor of emptiness.
The hours that had passed since I had last eaten were not enough to trigger the second hunger. That would take weeks and months of malnutrition. Yet, here it was. I could feel it in my belly. Prickly, needlelike, clawing. I knew it was an illusion, yet the sensation was unshakable. I lowered my head, trying in vain to quicken my steps. A haze clouded my eyes. I was nearly oblivious to my surroundings.
I shambled north and east, bumping into trees and benches, tripping a few times, scraping my hands. I crossed Rothschild Boulevard, turned onto Allenby Street, and followed it north past the Great Synagogue and the Matmid Theater. There were dozens of shops along both sides of Allenby Street, but on that day I could not tell what they were. I saw everything through a haze of desperate need and gnawing inner pain. I was dimly aware of people eying me warily and shying away as I stumbled by them on the street. One young mother even pulled a toddler tight to her, staring at me wide-eyed, ignoring the child's cries and wriggling. At one point, I felt a man's firm grip on my arm. "Let me help you, friend," he said. It was no one I knew—I might not have recognized him through the fog in my eyes even if we were acquainted—and I yanked my arm away. He persisted, and his voice took on a concerned tone. "You look sick. Sit down and rest or you'll fall." Again came the hand on my arm. With a moan I pushed him away. Hard. I heard a grunt of pain as he fell, and a short curse. I did not stay behind to see if he was all right. My need was the only thing I was aware of.
I was perspiring profusely and my hair was matted to my scalp. I was breathing ragged and labored breaths. Despite the warmth of the day, I was cold to my bones, as if I were once more a slave laborer in the freezing Polish winter. My teeth were chattering, and my hands shook so hard I stuck them in my pockets.
A few doors north of the corner of Allenby and Balfour Streets, I stepped into the comforting familiarity of Greta's Café. As usual, she was perched behind the bar on her high chair, close to the window through which she could observe the street. She was wearing a short-sleeved dress, white with gray and red horizontal stripes. Her gold necklace dangled outside of the cloth between her voluminous breasts. She was perusing a newspaper spread out on top of the bar. She raised her head as I entered, her eyes rounding in alarm when she saw my face.